I
don't recall seeing him at that Hamburg
press conference in April 1983, but if it
helps his posthumous reputation I'll let
his friends claim the glory for him.

April
9, 2007 (Easter Monday)London
(England)

IT SEEMS that I have eyes and
ears everywhere. A
reader tells me that I
was given a back-handed compliment by
[newspaper
executive] Magnus
Linklater on BBC Radio Scotland's 'Book Cafe'
programme today.

He was being interviewed about a fire that had
destroyed many books in his family home's library,
and said that he was "deeply embarrassed" to
discover that he had a
copy of 'Hitler's War'.

Linklater, so my Scots friend tells me, said on
the radio today that I was "a very, very good
historian", but "a pro-Nazi propagandist"; he then
read out my inscription in his book: "For
Magnus, an old friend in trials and
tribulations".

Of course, he and the interviewer had a good
laugh about it - "embarrassing or what?" My
reader says I can listen to the programme via the
bbc.co.uk website, using the 'listen again' section
of the 'listen via the web' system on the Radio
Scotland homepage.

YES, I think I remember those trials and
tribulations. Magnus Linklater (right)
bought the fabulous Hitler
Diaries for The Sunday Times, having
cheated me out of the credit and fee for finding
them. I discovered they were fakes and told him by
letter dated December 18, 1982. He kept it to
himself. The Sunday Times published them in
April 1983. Served him right!

In August 1982 Munich document expert Dr
August Priesack had first hinted at the
existence of these items during a luncheon in
London with me. That autumn I passed the tip to
The Sunday Times and offered to put them in
contact with Priesack and Gerd Heidemann.
The man I dealt with at The Sunday Times was
the aforementioned Magnus Linklater, their features
editor. Linklater and The Sunday Times
promised me a ten percent commission upon
publication, based on any fee they paid to the
owners of the Hitler Diaries in return for
identifying these gentlemen.

For many weeks I heard no more. That December of
1982 I myself saw the items for the first time in
August Priesack's home in Munich, decided within
hours that they were fake, and I warned The
Sunday Times in a letter dated December 18,
1982. I sent identical warning letters to
Heidemann, Priesack, the Stuttgart industrialist
Fritz Stiefel, and Billy Price, a
Texas collector who I believed might also be taken
in. Among other points, I said that "Eva
Braun's" handwriting was wrong, that Hitler did
not draw the sketches, that the diary extracts were
implausible, and that a Hermann Göring
letterhead was obviously forged.

More
months passed, then Heinz Höhne, an
editor at Der Spiegel, telephoned me in
April 1983 and asked what he knew about a press
conference announced for April 24 by rival news
magazine Stern to launch some "diaries" of
historic importance.

"Hitler's?" I gasped. "We don't know," said
Höhne.

He phoned me a few minutes later to confirm:
"Hitler's".

I hooted with laughter. I guffawed even louder
when Höhne told me that The Sunday
Times was publishing them in London, and they
had paid millions too. Magnus Linklater had gone
behind my back, contacted the owners, and bought
the rights to these dubious documents. ...

When Stern introduced the Diaries at
their famous press conference on April 25, 1983, I
was there, smuggled in by Bild Zeitung,
camouflaged as their reporter. Twenty-four years
have passed since then, but I remember every second
-- the
dryness in my mouth as I got up to denounce the
Diaries as fakes; my muttered remark to
Bild's editor, "Torpedo Running," as we
elbowed our way over to the microphone; the ensuing
uproar, as cameras were tipped over and floodlights
hurled across the room; my five minutes of glory as
security guards threw me out of the press
conference into the arms of Good Morning
America, waiting outside, to broadcast live to
the entire United States; the newsreader shouting,
"If you've got shares in Stern magazine
today, sell!"

In the USA the History
Channel made a television documentary on the
scandal; there is the usual commercial break half
way through. The first part still ends with a
lead-in to part 2, "In Part 2 we see how a famous
British historian interrupts Stern's press
conference to explode the diaries as fakes."

For a year or two when PBS showed that film,
Part 2 did include the newsreel footage of my
intervention -- my five "killer" questions about
the forensic tests on ink, glue, paper; the fact
that Hitler's handwriting was mysteriously
unaffected by the assassin's bomb on July 20, 1944
although his right arm was so badly hurt that he
had to shake Benito Mussolini's hand with
his left, and so on. If you see the History Channel
movie now, the lead-in is still there but ... the
newsreel footage in Part 2 has gone into George
Orwell's memory hole. I have vanished from the
celluloid.

As for The Sunday Times, of course, it
was too good a chance for me to miss. I had fed the
names of Priesack and Heidemann to them - I had
kept my part of the bargain. That the Diaries had
turned out to be fake, that was not my problem: I
had subsequently warned them and in good time.

A few days after the famous Stern press
conference, I wrote a tongue in cheek letter to
Linklater at The Sunday Times "demanding" my
ten percent. Since they had paid several million
dollars, it was not a small sum. We batted letters
back and forth for some weeks, and of course they
never paid.

Subsequently a
British television company made a very fine
six-part comedy film on the diaries, "Selling
Hitler", and my modestly heroic part was well
portrayed by actor Roger Lloyd Pack.

TODAY
the news agencies report the death of the German
Hitler-historian Dr Werner Maser,
left, also known as "Professor." French
newspapers report: Il fut également le
premier historien à qualifier d'imposture
les soi-disant carnets d'Adolf Hitler
publiés en 1983 par le magazine allemand
Stern" - "He was also the first historian to
dismiss as a forgery the so-called Diaries of Adolf
Hitler which the German magazine Stern
published in 1983."

I don't recall seeing him at that Hamburg press
conference in April 1983, but if it helps his
posthumous reputation I'll let his friends claim
the glory for him. I'm easygoing about things like
that.